Archive for the ‘Misc’ Category

I am shocked at how much time it took me to get git-svn working on my mac. I use MacPorts, which works well most of the time. Sometimes it has problems which makes me really wish for apt-get on OS X. apt-get normally has worked much nicer for me, but can have its issues too. I even occasionally wish for Windows and a simple install.exe which works 95% of the time out of the box. Really I wish Apple would throw some engineer support to MacPorts and make the service rock solid.

I have had git installed and working for awhile, but preparing to switch our main project from Subversion (svn) to git, I thought I should start using git-svn. It seemed smart to use git-svn for awhile to get used to git, before a full switch so I could fall back on svn in a crunch. I decided to start using git-svn, but the first run of the git-svn command caused this error, and I had no idea how much of my night was about to be wasted…

Can't locate SVN/Core.pm in @INC

Searching led to a couple of webpages, but the most useful was getting git to work on OS X Tiger. It had a quick fix that might work or the long route fix. For some lucky people it is just a path problem. I checked if that was the case for me, by the following command

PATH=/opt/local/bin:$PATH; git svn

unfortunately for me I got the same error, OK I need to reinstall SVN with additional bindings…

I spent some time searching and eventually I find the solution to the serf error. I couldn’t read the blog because it wasn’t in English, but I could read enough to solve my MacPorts serf install problem. I followed these few lines from the blog

But I also have an additional path added from when I originally built git from source, and it looks like I was running my old broken version of git-svn. So I just had to remove this one line from my .bash_profile

export PATH=~/projects/git-1.5.6.1:$PATH

and hours later and with a ton of frustration I have a fully functioning git-svn.

I have heard about new Ruby tools since I did my Ruby Tools Roundup. I am always interested in tools that can help improve our code, so I had to check some of them out. Similar to my last tools post, I will be trying out a tool and writing my general impressions along with the basic usage.

reek

I have to start with reek, since it has been the most requested and searched on our site since I originally wrote about tools. reek will help identify code smells, allowing you to fix up your code. Instead of looking at cyclomatic complexity or other metrics, reek looks at patterns to warn you about bad code. Reek currently detects a few code smells (Long Method, Large Class, Feature Envy, Uncommunicative Name, Long Parameter List, Utility Function, Nested Iterators, Control Couple, Duplication) but more are on the way.

I think this project is useful but would need to be more customized before a nightly run would yield very useful results. The biggest problem I have is the signal to noise ratio seemed pretty high. Reek was warning me about “long methods” that were only 7 statements long, which just isn’t something I am concerned about. The warnings on duplicate methods calls can be useful, after running reek on a few files I found a couple places where duplicate method calls were wasting time. Many of the other smells are interesting like ‘Feature Envy’, and ‘Utility Function’. I will need to use reek more before I know if these smells are good indicators or often false positives.

Below reek finds a utility function next_tick which is definitely a helper function that actually exists in two of our files, which probably should be moved into a helper mixin.

def next_tick
if(EM.reactor_running?)
EM.next_tick do
yield
end
else
yield
end
end

I am really looking forward to see how the tool progresses. If the project allows for a simple config customization to change the thresholds as well as ignore some files/smells, this could become a very useful tool to help keep a team maintain a high expectation of code quality. It would be useful to get nightly reports about any code that might not meet expectations, so a quick group code review could decide if it is an exception (which can be quickly added to the config) or if the code should be refactored and cleaned up.

Towelie

Towelie helps discover duplication in Ruby code, it will help keep your code DRY. It doesn’t have a nice interface at the moment and it is pretty young code. That being said, it can still be a really useful tool to help guide refactoring and code cleanup.

There are currently many duplications because we are maintaining two clients while deciding what route to eventually take. We have also moved a lot of our shared client code into a mixin, and Towelie finds some methods that really should be moved there as well such as the methods “quit” and “send_quit”, which is currently duped in 4 files. Towelie also points to the fact that we should refactor our reporters because they both duplicate code.

I have always been annoyed with copied and pasted functions accidentally working its way in code, this could be a useful nightly run to keep a team DRY. Sometimes two team members implement the same functionality without even knowing a solution already exists in the code base. If you want to go a bit more in depth, check out Giles Bowkett’s (creator of Towelie) How to use Towelie

Flay

Flay is another great tool by Ryan Davis who also works on Heckle and Flog which I covered in the past. Flay, like Towelie, helps keep your code DRY, it detects exact and similar code throughout a project. It seems to be more powerful than Towelie, as seen in this Towelie and Flay comparison. My biggest complaint is the current release has some pretty basic output that you see below. The output I got from Towelie was immediately more recognizable and useful, while Flay currently requires you to dig in a bit deeper on your own into its suggestions. An improvement is already being worked on and a verbose output mode should be in the release soon. Once better output is included I think Flay will be immediately useful out of the box even with small amounts of developer effort.

I like that Flay has weight system, which should make it easy to set some threshold to ignore, high level weights are more likely to be worth your time and attention. One piece of code Flay tagged with a low weight was code that rescued and logged different errors thrown, which while similar actually served a purpose.

Digging into the Flay results turned up some duplicate code that Towelie had missed. Since Towelie also caught a method that was duped in 4 client files that Flay missed (I was expecting Towelie’s results to be a subset of what Flay found), perhaps there is room for both of the tools and learning to work with both a little bit is worth the time. After a little bit of work perhaps one of the projects will become a clearly better option. Until then I will be following both of these projects.

Conclusions

That should cover it for this Ruby tools post, but I am really enjoying checking out the tools showing up in the Ruby scene. So as always let me know if I missed something, or if there is a tool you would like to see a full write up on. After some of the tools mature a little bit I will have to revisit a few of the tools which are currently in the early stages. I hope the Ruby tools scene keeps as active as it has been lately because there are some interesting projects being worked on.

Although I’m not actually the CTO of Devver, I had the pleasure of attending the Boulder CTO lunch this past Monday since Dan was out of town.

This week, the group had Todd Vernon from Lijit come lead the discussion. Although Todd is currently CEO of Lijit, he was CTO at his former company, Raindance.

The group that was assembled was small but awesome – I had the opportunity to learn not only from Todd, but also from the CTOs of a few of last years TechStars companies.

The discussion touched on a ton of topics, but two (related) themes that were heavily discussed were the role of the CTO and how a company grows from a technology perspective. I’ve organized my notes below. Keep in mind that these are the collected thoughts from a number of different participants and I may not have captured their ideas with 100% accuracy.

The Role of a CTO

What is the difference between a CTO and a VP of Engineering?

CTO is about leadership for technical issues, interfacing with the business side, guiding the product, get people excited about product from a technical point of view.

VPoE is almost one step above Chief Architect, more on a management side, getting product delivered.

1st time CTOs need to figure out their exact role. It’s a very amorphous role, depending on the company.

CTO needs to be able to tell the whole business story, understand the good parts and bad.

Early on, CTO should insert themselves into the sales process as much as possible (especially right after you hire the sales person). You need to be able to hear what customers say they want, so you can translate that into what they really need.

The Technology Onion

There is a technology onion – make sure the core of the onion is owned by company (the outer layers, not as important). The CTO needs to figure out the relationship between the technologies and the company’s partnerships. The closer a technology is to the core of the onion, the more important it is to own it and to make sure it scales.

For instance, if you’re depending on Google for search, you’re powerless to change features if things don’t work as your customers want/expect. If search is core to your business (near the core of the onion), consider building it internally. It’s the CTOs role to make that case, because business people will never understand the need to spend money to get “the same thing.”

Having to re-architect a core component of a company can really hurt growth. Assume you’re going to be successful, so plan for that.

Along the same lines, one concern about using EC2 is that you get tied to the platform and your business is dependent on an outside force you can’t control. Hosting on EC2 can be quite different than hosting your own boxes.

Acceptable Failures

What is acceptable downtime? It depends on when – between midnight to 1-2 AM, it might be OK to be down for a few minutes. CTOs need to determine what acceptable downtime is and tell that the to the rest of management and have people agree.

CTOs need to make decisions (for instance, what is the acceptable down time, acceptable data loss, or acceptable time for page load) and then tell the entire organization. That way, when something bad happens, you can explain that everyone agreed on the specific numbers. It’s unlikely your business will need to be (or can be) 100% perfect on all metrics, but people need to understand what the goal is and why it’s realistic.

Growing/Scaling/Monitoring

If at least one person is using your service, you should have two web servers. It gives you ton of flexibility. Having two boxes forces you to work out most of the issues early (it’s a lot different getting to 2 boxes than 3 or 4). It’s not about load, it’s about reliability.

No matter how useful you are, if you are not reliable, someone will blog, “it’s cool, but it doesn’t work reliably.”

Downtime spreads very fast across Twitter. Consider tweeting about upcoming service interruptions ahead of time so customers are aware.

After more than 15 people, you need a dedicated operations person. Get some basic monitoring services early – after a server is under load, it’s really hard to diagnose. Try to detect stuff early, it’s easier to debug.

With startups, generally the problem tends to be slow requests rather than complete service downtime. Make sure your monitoring service will alert you with slow requests.

Get app specific stuff – a warning like “High CPU load,” is harder to understand (it might be a problem, or maybe the machine is just handling a lot of requests successfully), but “Page X takes 80 sec to load” is more obvious.

As you grow, try to measure more and more. Things often degrade slowly, and one day you just notice its too slow and it’s hard to go back and find the root of the problem.

Make two lists: a) the most catastrophic things that could happen and b) the most likely things that could happen. Where those lists overlap, you need to fix something. But there will be some risks that you decide are reasonable risks for the business (revisit these risks regularly as things change).

Regarding backup – always make sure you try to restore some data (before you really need it). You need to make sure it works and make sure its fast enough.

You should always be able to describe at a high level how the service will scale infinitely (it doesn’t have to be technically perfect, but it has to be believable). When someone wants to purchase, that’ll be a huge help – the business guy on the other side of the table will want to buy, but the technical guy doesn’t want to buy (he wants to build it in-house).

I hope those notes make some sense and give you a good feel for the discussion we had. I’m looking forward to attending more of these lunches (I hope they’ll continue to let a few CEOs sneak in…)

I know everyone has posted a list of the best/must-have iPhone apps. I am sure many people have also posted lists of Apps they would like to have, but it is amazingly fun so I decided I should do it to.

This is my list of apps and solutions I want for the iPhone. They don’t have to all necessarily be native apps. If you know of an web-app (that works on the iPhone) which provides the functionality I am looking for, let me know.

I want something like Brain Age for the GameBoy on the iPhone. Spending a few minutes doing little puzzles and math when I have downtime seems like a better use of my time then just playing random games. I have Brain Tuner, which is nice, but I want some more options/different puzzles.

I want a Google Contacts to Apple contacts one-time syncer, All my iPhone contacts are missing their emails. All my Gmail contacts are missing their phone numbers, someone help me sync that up.

I want full syncing between my Google calendar and the native apple calendar app. I always had this and it was really easy to do on pocket PC. I want a full 2 way sync. Google and Apple seem pretty buddy buddy, so get on this.

I want flash cards, with prebuilt decks. I would like to be able to work my way through some word decks building my vocabulary. I also would love to have some Spanish/English decks. I am working on improving my Spanish by listening to Coffee Break Spanish, and having a Spanish study deck would be great.

I want an EBook reader – oh wait, someone just pointed one out to me (thanks Matt) it is called Stanza. It’s seriously awesome, if they add a screen reader, it would be perfect. I could listen to some classics books while jogging/driving.

I want GPS tracking that works. I have a great iPhone app called Trailguru, which tracks movement/location with GPS and can tell me the speed and total distance I go when I run. The problem is my GPS seems to stop working after a day or two, and won’t come back until I restart the iPhone or re-sync. Then I want a driving direction helper, something that says out loud, “turn approaching in 200 feet,” just like every in-car navigation system.

I want an on-the-go web reader (Ben shared this idea with me). This would offer a way to open/transfer all the tabs or URLs currently in my browser over to the iPhone. Preferably, it would open them all in an offline mode allowing me to then read the articles through out my day, while being on the move. I really would like if this wasn’t even in Safari since that crashes the iPhone too often.

I want a full Flash player, or at the very least the ability to play Flash videos. There are so many sites with Flash videos and streaming video that are useless on the iPhone. I really wanted to watch the debates on my iPhone because I had to leave in the middle, but while every site on the internet was streaming the debates, not one of them had a way to view the debate on an iPhone. Apparently Adobe has confirmed working on Flash, but Apple is likely to block it. Screw you Apple, even Pocket PC phones years ago had Flash.

I want streaming internet radio. Yes, Pandora and a few others are nice, but why can’t I just browse and listen to any streaming net radio station? It would be even better if it could allow me to browse many of the well known stations (shoutcast), with out having to search through iPhone’s browser.

I want something similar to Elasticfox for managing and monitoring EC2 instances on the iPhone. Actually beyond that it would be cool to be able to manage a few scripts and SSH credentials on a site. It wouldn’t allow arbitrary SSH, but you could store ssh login keys and a few scripts it could run and return the results. This would allow you to ahead of time write some scripts to monitor, clean up, restart or do other tasks, which you could then execute and verify the results of remotely over your iPhone. A sysadmin’s dream, until then I have pTerm for slow clumsy SSH.

That is all I have for now, but if you have thought of iPhone apps you would like to have leave some comments. If you know of a solution to any of the problems I mention above let me know. Some of these apps I would be willing to pay for so developers get busy.

Boulder has a lot going on in terms of tech startups. A bunch of Boulder startups got together for a pretty interesting plan. A group of startups will be flying 100 interviewees out to Boulder to interview potential employees and let them get a feel for the city. There has already been some pretty good coverage of the plan on TechCrunch and elsewhere.

So if you are interested in getting a great job with some of the awesome startups in Boulder, I highly recommend checking out and applying to Boulder.Me.

During my search for my first “real” computer science job during my senior year of college, I compared a lot of factors for various jobs including city, company, project, salary, and benefits. The salary stuff was fun to think about (especially after four years of being a poor college student) and I was looking to move to a bigger city somewhere outside of the Midwest (after growing up and going to college there). But mostly I thought about the company and project. Which companies would I want to work for? What project would interest me the most? Where would I learn the coolest stuff?

In hindsight, I realize I’d overlooked the single most important question – is this company going to own my ideas?

I never even thought to ask my prospective employers about their policies on IP and moonlighting. It wasn’t until I’d accepted an offer and received their legal documents that it dawned on me. And even then, I didn’t mind. I thought it was just standard practice and I really didn’t have much of choice*.

For those of you that don’t know, many large software companies technically own everything you think of while you’re working for them. No, not just the stuff that you do at work. They also own the stuff that you do at home, after hours. There is no clean separation of “work” and “personal” projects.

This manifests itself in a few ways. First of all, you may notice that the company explicitly bans working on open-source projects. Or they may require you get explicit permission for “moonlighting” i.e. working on non-work-related projects after hours.

At the very least, you should ask any potential employer about their IP policy before you accept a job. You may be able to get them to loosen their restrictions, especially if they really want you (I haven’t personally done this and I’m not sure if the bigger companies would go for it, but it’s worth a shot).

In fact, I’d argue that you should not accept any job that claims ownership over your outside-of-work ideas – even if that means compromising salary, benefits, project, company, or location. The benefits of owning your ideas are just too numerous and important.

Side projects make you a better programmer. I don’t care if you’re contributing to open-source projects, building a for-profit website, or just toying with a personal project in your own time, writing code that doesn’t relate to work will expand your skills and make you a better programmer at work.

Side projects help your career. Working on projects that anyone can examine are much more valuable than a good resume or recommendation.

It seems surprising to me that any employer would be reluctant to let hackers work on open-source projects. At Viaweb, we would have been reluctant to hire anyone who didn’t. When we interviewed programmers, the main thing we cared about was what kind of software they wrote in their spare time. You can’t do anything really well unless you love it, and if you love to hack you’ll inevitably be working on projects of your own.

Your side projects won’t just help you during your next active job search. They form a sort of passive job search in which you’re letting the outside world know how awesome you are. If a better offer comes along, great. Even if you’re happy where you are, you can use external offers as leverage with your current employer (and not just for salary, either. A higher profile outside the company may convince your boss to give you more responsibility at work, publish whitepapers, or attend more conferences).

You can start your own company. If you own your own ideas, then when that little site you built in a weekend starts getting a bajillion visitors a day – you’re free to pursue it. Hello, no boss/early retirement**.

Even if you quit and your startup fails, your career will probably be better off anyway. In Hiring is Obsolete, Paul Graham writes:

Even if your startup does tank, you won’t harm your prospects with employers. To make sure I asked some friends who work for big companies. I asked managers at Yahoo, Google, Amazon, Cisco and Microsoft how they’d feel about two candidates, both 24, with equal ability, one who’d tried to start a startup that tanked, and another who’d spent the two years since college working as a developer at a big company. Every one responded that they’d prefer the guy who’d tried to start his own company.

If you’re trying to rationalize taking that more restrictive job anyway (I mean, they’ve give you free soda at work!), you might be thinking:

“I don’t want to do a startup anyway.” Well, OK. But are you sure you’ll feel the same way in a year? In any case, working on side projects is good for your career, even if you never do a startup.

“No one will know.” Maybe you’re thinking that when you have that good idea for a startup, you’ll just keep it in your head until you quit. There’s a couple of problems with that. First, you won’t really understand your idea until you start working on it. Secondly, some of the best startup ideas come from projects that didn’t initially have any commercial value (and therefore wouldn’t appear to be worth quitting to pursue)

“They won’t be able to enforce it.” You mileage may vary by state (I’m no lawyer, but I vaguely understand the California courts may be ruling against companies in these kinds of disputes), but it probably won’t matter anyway. Since you don’t want to spend time tied up in court, just the threat that your company could come after you will prevent you from working on most ideas. And even if you have a great idea and decide to go for it – do you really think future business partners and investors will want to hear that your old company might own the core IP of your company?

“My new employer lets me list the IP I own before I joined the company, so what’s the big deal?” The big deal is that you’re almost certainly going to think of new (and likely better) ideas during the time you’re employed at the company. Do you really think all your future ideas will fall into the narrow set of things you’ve thought of before you join? Doubtful.

If you feel you like have to take the job (or you’ve already done so), make sure to get permission in writing before starting to work on your new idea. But of course, just the hassle of getting permission is a strong disincentive to not work on your idea at all.

“All CS jobs are going to require me to sign away my IP” On the contrary, many jobs will let you keep your IP – especially if you are doing programming for a company that doesn’t consider delivering software to be it’s core business. Clearly some jobs let you do other stuff – or no one would be contributing to open source. For instance, Matt Mullenweg got to hack on WordPress while he was working on blogs and new media for CNET (in fact, working on WordPress was part of his job, which is extra cool but probably harder to accomplish).

In order to own your ideas, you may have to sacrifice other aspects of your job (not work at a “brand name” company, work on more mundane projects at work***, make less money), but I’d argue that it’s worth it, especially at the beginning of your career. It’s just too limiting to give away that much of your potential – because you never know where the next idea will take you.

*I ended up accepting the job at Microsoft. For the record, I really loved parts of the job (but also wish I could have worked on open source). I hear they have relaxed their policies since I left, which is definitely a good thing.

** For the record, I am not advocating taking ideas from work (the stuff you are being paid to work on) and starting a company based on that (or, for that matter, putting those ideas into open-source code). That’s illegal and immoral. I’m referring to the case where you’re working on X at work – but you want to keep your options open to do a startup that does Y.

*** Being less satisfied at work might actually be a good thing if you are interested in eventually doing a startup, since it will increase the chance that you’ll work on something really cool in your free time.

When I first started working with Ruby I used RadRails (which still has the best integrated test runner I have used). Various problems and crashes with RadRails along with exciting features being added to Ruby NetBeans enticed me to switch. I enjoyed NetBeans and some of its features, but the weight of my IDE began slowing me down. I didn’t have the control to tell it not to do some things that annoyed me.

My cofounder Ben had been using Emacs since learning Ruby. The quick speed that he could work with code, made me wonder what features I was actually using in my bloated IDE. It turned out that I had been getting annoyed with most of the advanced features because they stalled my system, crashed occasionally, or really weren’t that useful. An example of a cool feature that I hardly found useful would be Netbean’s Ruby code completion. In the past I had used Emacs to develop all my C and C++ code and I always liked it, so I decided to switch away from NetBeans and see how Emacs would hold up as my editor.

I have enjoyed using Emacs and think that I can more quickly work with code with far less hassle and frustration. I don’t expect to move back to a large IDE anytime soon. That being said there are definitely pros and cons to working with a full IDE vs an editor, and I find myself missing features sometimes. So I thought I would list out some of the pros and cons so others can weigh these issues themselves.

Reasons I miss NetBeans:

Graphical test integration linking to the lines of code in the stack trace

Navigate -> ‘Go to Declaration’, ‘Go to Test’, ‘Go to Action or View’

Easy code refactoring and renaming

Code completion, occasionally (e.g. was the Array function called include? or includes?)

Frequently stalls (Especially if you have been out of the application for awhile)

Crashes (At least every couple days)

Not enough user control (stop indexing everything)

Magic behind the scenes (constantly connecting to SVN every time I saved a file)

Debugger didn’t work well (ended up running on the command line to get debugging)

Ruby Console didn’t work well (ended up using irb on the command line instead)

All tasks that NetBeans handles nicely for you like testing or migrations were slower (ended up running all rake task and tests on the command line)

Resource hog, making everything else I am running far slower

NetBeans ignores canceling tasks and continues trying to run them

Booting up takes a few minute before NetBeans completes its various start-up tasks (You can work during some of the start-up tasks, but it is slow and unresponsive until it has completed the tasks)

Things I like about Emacs:

Better/more key commands (I love kill/yank – the ability to kill until the end of line is incredibly useful)

Incredibly fast, if I am working live with someone I can jump in make an edit and be back live showing them the change on the project (Imagine having to boot NetBeans to do this)

Multiple copy and paste buffers. This is something you get with GNU Emacs on an X system. I can use both kill/yank from Emacs while also using my normal copy and paste to maintain two independent copy and paste buffers, very handy

Complete control over the editor, no longer do I have to deal with auto closing brackets or any other ‘helpful’ defaults the editor includes (You can turn them all off, but I get annoyed having to go change a bunch of settings)